Thermal activation of current in an inhomogeneous Schottky diode with a Gaussian distribution of barrier height

This paper investigates the thermal activation behaviour of current in an inhomogeneous Schottky diode with a Gaussian distribution of barrier height by numerical simulation. The analytical Gaussian distribution model predicted that the I--V--T curves may intersect with the possibility of the negative thermal activation of current, but may be contradictory to the thermionic emission mechanism in a Schottky diode. It shows that the cause of the unphysical phenomenon is related to the incorrect calculation of current across very low barriers. It proposes that junction voltage V_j, excluding the voltage drop across series resistance from the external bias, is a crucial parameter for correct calculation of the current across very low barriers. For correctly employing the thermionic emission model, V_j needs to be smaller than the barrier height Ф. With proper scheme of series resistance connection where the condition of V_j > Ф is guaranteed, I--V--T curves of an inhomogeneous Schottky diode with a Gaussian distribution of barrier height have been simulated, which demonstrate normal thermal activation. Although the calculated results exclude the intersecting possibility of I--V--T curves with an assumption of temperature-independent series resistance, it shows that the intersecting is possible when the series resistance has a positive temperature coefficient. Finally, the comparison of our numerical and analytical results indicates that the analytical Gaussian distribution model is valid and accurate in analysing I--V--T curves only for small barrier height inhomogeneity.     

Studying of barrier height and ideality factor relation in the nano sized Au-n type Si Schottky diodes

The results of formation of the operating potential barrier height (Φ_в) of inhomogeneous Schottky diodes (SD) in view of an additional electric field in the near contact region of the semiconductor and features of its dependence on the external applied voltage are presented. A correlation, between SD heterogeneity and dependence between potential barrier height (Φ_в) and ideality factor (n), is presented. Using conducting probe atomic force microscope (CP-AFM) techniques, it is shown that Au/n-Si diodes consist of sets of parallel-connected and cooperating nano diodes with the contact surfaces sizes in the order of 100-200 nm. The effective Φ_в and ideality factors of the SD have been obtained from the current-voltage (I-V) characteristics, which were measured using a CP-AFM along a contact surface. It was experimentally shown that the forward and reverse part of I-V characteristics and their effective Φ_в and ideality factors of the identically fabricated nano-SD differ from diode to diode. The Φ_в for the nano-SD has ranged from 0.565 to 0.723 eV and ideality factor from 1.11 to 1.98. No correlation can be found between the Φ_в and ideality factor. The Φ_в distribution obtained from the I-V characteristics has been fitted by a Gaussian function but the ideality factor distribution could not be fitted by a Gaussian function.     

Barrier height inhomogeneities in InN/GaN heterostructure based Schottky junctions

The electrical transport properties of InN/GaN heterostructure based Schottky junctions were studied over a wide temperature range of 200-500 K. The barrier height and the ideality factor were calculated from current-voltage (I-V) characteristics based on thermionic emission (TE), and found to be temperature dependent. The barrier height was found to increase and the ideality factor to decrease with increasing temperature. The observed temperature dependence of the barrier height indicates that the Schottky barrier height is inhomogeneous in nature at the heterostructure interface. Such inhomogeneous behavior was modeled by assuming the existence of a Gaussian distribution of barrier heights at the heterostructure interface.     

Edge termination study and fabrication of a 4Hben SiC junction barrier Schottky diode

The 4H-SiC junction barrier Schottky (JBS) diodes terminated by field guard rings and offset field plate are designed, fabricated and characterized. It is shown experimentally that a 3-μm P-type implantation window spacing gives an optimum trade-off between forward drop voltage and leakage current density for these diodes, yielding a specific on-resistance of 8.3 mΩ·cm². A JBS diode with a turn-on voltage of 0.65 V and a reverse current density less than 1 A/cm² under 500 V is fabricated, and the reverse recovery time is tested to be 80 ns, and the peak reverse current is 28.1 mA. Temperature-dependent characteristics are also studied in a temperature range of 75 ℃-200 ℃. The diode shows a stable Schottky barrier height of up to 200 ℃ and a stable operation under a continuous forward current of 100 A/cm².     

Schottky barrier and pn-junctionI/V plots — Small signal evaluation

This paper proposes and examines three different plots for the determination of the saturation current, the ideality factor, and the series resistance of Schottky diodes and solar cells from the measurement of a single current (I)/voltage(V) curve. All three plots utilize the small signal conductance and avoid the traditional Norde plot completely. A test reveals that the series resistance and the barrier height of a test diode can be determined with an accuracy of better than 1%. Finally it is shown that a numerical agreement between measured and fittedI/V curves is generally insufficient to prove the physical validity of current transport models.     

Al/Ti/4H-SiC Schottky barrier diodes with inhomogeneous barrier heights

This paper investigates the current-voltage (I-V) characteristics of Al/Ti/4H-SiC Schottky barrier diodes (SBDs) in the temperature range of 77 K-500 K,which shows that Al/Ti/4H-SiC SBDs have good rectifying behaviour.An abnormal behaviour,in which the zero bias barrier height decreases while the ideality factor increases with decreasing temperature (T),has been successfully interpreted by using thermionic emission theory with Gaussian distribution of the barrier heights due to the inhomogeneous barrier height at the Al/Ti/4H-SiC interface.The effective Richardson constant A =154 A/cm 2 · K 2 is determined by means of a modified Richardson plot ln(I 0 /T 2)-(qσ) 2 /2(kT) 2 versus q/kT,which is very close to the theoretical value 146 A/cm 2 · K 2.     

Electrical properties of Al/p–Ge and Al/Methyl Green/p–Ge diodes

Methyl green (MG) film has been grown for the first time on p–Ge semiconductor using a simple and low-cost drop coating method. The current–voltage (I–V) characteristics of Al/p–Ge and Al/MG/p–Ge diodes have been investigated in the temperature range of 20–300 K. A potential barrier height as high as 0.82 eV has been achieved for Al/MG/p–Ge diode, which has high rectification rate, at room temperature. It is seen that the barrier height of the Al/MG/p–Ge diode at the room temperature is larger than that of Al/p–Ge diode and ideality factor value of 1.14 calculated for Al/MG/p–Ge diode is lower than Al/p–Ge diode. The temperature coefficient of barrier height of the Al/MG/p–Ge diode has been calculated as 2.6 meV/K. The evaluation of current–voltage characteristics shows that the barrier height of the diode increases with the increasing temperature.     

Prediction of lateral barrier height in identically prepared Ni/n-type GaAs Schottky barrier diodes

We have identically prepared Ni/n-GaAs/In Schottky barrier diodes (SBDs) with doping density of 7.3 × 10¹⁵ cm⁻³. The barrier height for the Ni/n-GaAs/In SBDs from the current-voltage characteristics have varied from 0.835 to 0.856 eV, and ideality factor n from 1.02 to 1.08. We have determined a lateral homogeneous barrier height value of 0.862 eV for the Ni/n-GaAs/In SBD from the experimental linear relationship between barrier heights and ideality factors.     

Effect of nanopatches on electrical behavior of Ni/n-type Si Schottky diode

Topological surface measurement of thin metal film using a conducting probe atomic force microscope (C-AFM) shows that thin metal film deposited on Ni/n-Si Schottky diode (SD) consists of patches. These patches are sets of parallel connected and electrically cooperating nano-contacts of size between 50 and 100nm. Every individual patch acts as an individual diode with different I-V curve, barrier height (BH) and ideality factor (n). Between these diodes or patches, there are spot field distributions; the patches with different local work functions are in direct electric contact with surrounding patches. As a result, a potential difference between surfaces of patches, the so-called electrostatic spot field E_f, is formed. It is shown that in real metal-semiconductor (MS) contacts, patches with quite different configurations, various geometrical sizes and local work functions are randomly distributed on the surface of metal; hence direction and intensity of spot field are non-uniformly distributed along the surface of metal. There is a linear dependence between barrier height and ideality factor, which is the consequence of reduction of distance of the maximum of BH from the interface. This dependency is the sign of reduction of contribution of a peripheral current.     

Investigation of current transport parameters of Ti/4H-SiC MPS diode with inhomogeneous barrier

The current transport parameters of 4H-SiC merged PiN Schottky(MPS) diode are investigated in a temperature range of 300-520 K.Evaluation of the experimental current-voltage(I-V) data reveals the decrease in Schottky barrier height Φ b but an increase in ideality factor n,with temperature decreasing,which suggests the presence of an inhomogeneous Schottky barrier.The current transport behaviours are analysed in detail using the Tung’s model and the effective area of the low barrier patches is extracted.It is found that small low barrier patches,making only 4.3% of the total contact,may significantly influence the device electrical characteristics due to the fact that a barrier height of 0.968 eV is much lower than the average barrier height 1.39 eV.This shows that ion implantation in the Schottky contact region of MPS structure may result in a poor Ti/4H-SiC interface quality.In addition,the temperature dependence of the specific on-resistance(R on sp),T 2.14,is determined between 300 K and 520 K,which is similar to that predicted by a reduction in electron mobility.     

High-temperature current conduction through three kinds of Schottky diodes

Fundamentals of the Schottky contacts and the high-temperature current conduction through three kinds of Schottky diodes are studied. N-Si Schottky diodes, GaN Schottky diodes and AlGaN/GaN Schottky diodes are investigated by I--V--T measurements ranging from 300 to 523~K. For these Schottky diodes, a rise in temperature is accompanied with an increase in barrier height and a reduction in ideality factor. Mechanisms are suggested, including thermionic emission, field emission, trap-assisted tunnelling and so on. The most remarkable finding in the present paper is that these three kinds of Schottky diodes are revealed to have different behaviours of high-temperature reverse currents. For the n-Si Schottky diode, a rise in temperature is accompanied by an increase in reverse current. The reverse current of the GaN Schottky diode decreases first and then increases with rising temperature. The AlGaN/GaN Schottky diode has a trend opposite to that of the GaN Schottky diode, and the dominant mechanisms are the effects of the piezoelectric polarization field and variation of two-dimensional electron gas charge density.     

Current-voltage behaviour of Schottky diodes fabricated on p-type silicon for radiation hard detectors

Current-voltage (I-V) measurements were carried out on Schottky diodes fabricated on undoped and on metal-doped p-type silicon. The metals used are gold, platinum, erbium and niobium. The I-V data were used to extract the saturation current, the ideality factor and the Schottky barrier height for each of the five diodes. These parameters were correlated to the defect levels generated by the metals in silicon. The results show that in all cases the silicon has become relaxation-like after doping since the device current is Ohmic. This is in agreement with the existence of the midgap defect in all the doped devices as compiled from the literature. Such metal doped (or relaxation) devices have been found to perform better as radiation-hard particle detectors.     

Correlation between barrier heights and ideality factors of Cd/n-Si and Cd/p-Si Schottky barrier diodes

Our goal is to experimentally investigate whether or not the effective Schottky barrier heights (SBHs) and ideality factors obtained from the current-voltage (I-V) and capacitance-voltage (C-V) characteristics differ from diode to diode even if the samples were identically prepared. For this purpose, we prepared Cd/n-Si (33 dots) and Cd/p-Si (15 dots) diodes. The SBH for the Cd/n-Si diodes ranged from 0.701 to 0.605 eV, and ideality factor n from 1.913 to 1.213. Φ_b value for the Cd/p-Si diodes ranged from 0.688 to 0.730 eV, and ideality factor n value from 1.473 to 1.040. The experimental SBH distributions obtained from the C⁻²-V and I-V characteristics were fitted by a Gaussian function and their mean SBH values were calculated. Furthermore, the laterally homogeneous barrier heights were also computed from the extrapolation of the linear plot of experimental barrier heights versus ideality factors.     

Comparison of electrical parameters of Zn/p-Si and Sn/p-Si Schottky barrier diodes

In this study, current-voltage (I-V) and capacitance-voltage (C-V) characteristics of metal-semiconductor (MS) Zn/p-Si and Sn/p-Si Schottky diodes, with high resistivity silicon structures, are investigated. The parameters of series resistance (R_S), the ideality factor (n) and the barrier height (Φ_b) are determined by performing different plots from the forward bias current-voltage (I-V) and reverse bias capacitance-voltage (C-V) characteristics. Thus, the barrier heights (Φ_b) for the Si Schottky diodes obtained between 0.725 and 1.051 eV, the ideality factor (n) between 1.043 and 1.309, and the series resistance (R_S) between 12.594 and 12.950 kΩ. The energy distribution of interface states density was determined from the forward bias I-V characteristics by taking into account the bias dependence of the effective barrier height. It was concluded that the density of interface states in the considered energy range are in close agreement with each other values obtained for Zn/p-Si and Sn/p-Si Schottky diodes.     

Electrical properties of metal-GaAs Schottky barriers

Schottky barrier contacts have been fabricated by vacuum evaporation of thin films of six different metals (Mg, In, Al, Au, Bi and Sb) onto chemically cleaned n-type GaAs substrates. Bi and Sb contacts on GaAs have been reported for the first time. The contacts were examined for their C-V and I-V characteristics. The diodes exhibit near ideal characteristics for all the metals with values of the ideality factor n ranging from 1.06 to 1.1. The values of the barrier height obtained from C-V measurements could be brought into agreement with those obtained from I-V measurements only when the ideality factor was also included in the expression of the saturation current. By employing the most recent and reliable values of metal work function φ_M, the dependence of barrier height on φ_M has been investigated and an estimate of the surface state density and the Fermi level at the GaAs surface has been made. The surface state density obtained from this analysis is significantly larger than that reported by previous workers.     

Growth of InSe:Mn semiconductor crystals by Bridgman–Stockbarger technique and analysis of electron irradiation effects on Sn/InSe:Mn Schottky diodes

Mn-doped p-InSe semiconductor crystals were grown by Bridgman –Stockbarger technique. The crystals were analyzed by X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and fabricated Sn/InSe:Mn Schottky diodes. The current–voltage (I–V) and capacitance–voltage (C–V) measurements of diodes were investigated to determine the response of devices to electron irradiation with 9?MeV energy and 1.2?×?10¹⁰?e^??cm^?2 dose. After irradiation, the ideality factor and barrier height of the Sn/InSe:Mn Schottky diode were determined as 1.66 and 0.85?eV, respectively. Before irradiation, they were determined as 1.37 and 0.90?eV, respectively. It has been concluded that the radiation with high energy may contribute to form defects at the interface of the Sn/InSe:Mn device.     

Molecular control over Ag/p-Si diode by organic layer

Electrical transport properties of Ag metal-fluorescein sodium salt (FSS) organic layer-silicon junction have been investigated. The current-voltage (I-V) characteristics of the diode show rectifying behavior consistent with a potential barrier formed at the interface. The diode indicates a non-ideal I-V behavior with an ideality factor higher than unity. The ideality factor of the Ag/FSS/p-Si diode decreases with increasing temperature and the barrier height increases with increasing temperature. The barrier height (φ_b=0.98 eV) obtained from the capacitance-voltage (C-V) curve is higher than barrier height (φ_b=0.72 eV) derived from the I-V measurements. The barrier height of the Ag/FSS/p-Si Schottky diode at the room temperature is significantly larger than that of the Ag/p-Si Schottky diode. It is evaluated that the FSS organic layer controls electrical charge transport properties of Ag/p-Si diode by excluding effects of the SiO₂ residual oxides on the hybrid diode.     

Temperature-dependent characteristics of 4H-SiC junction barrier Schottky diodes

The current-voltage characteristics of 4H-SiC junction barrier Schottky(JBS) diodes terminated by an offset field plate have been measured in the temperature range of 25-300 C.An experimental barrier height value of about 0.5 eV is obtained for the Ti/4H-SiC JBS diodes at room temperature.A decrease in the experimental barrier height and an increase in the ideality factor with decreasing temperature are shown.Reverse recovery testing also shows the temperature dependence of the peak recovery current density and the reverse recovery time.Finally,a discussion of reducing the reverse recovery time is presented.     

AlGaN/GaN肖特基结参数分析与电流运输机理研究

通过对AlGaN/GaN HEMT器件肖特基栅电流输运机理的研究,在变温下采用I-V法对AlGaN/GaN上的Ni/Au肖特基势垒高度和理想因子进行了计算. 通过对不同电流机理的分立研究,得到了更为准确的势垒高度值_b. 通过分析温度在300—550K之间肖特基反向泄漏电流的特性,得出结论：AlGaN材料的表面漏电不是HEMT器件反向泄漏电流的主要来源. 关键词： AlGaN/GaN异质结 肖特基结 理想因子     

Temperature-dependent characteristics of 4Hben SiC junction barrier Schottky diodes

The current-voltage characteristics of 4H-SiC junction barrier Schottky (JBS) diodes terminated by an offset field plate have been measured in the temperature range of 25-300 ℃. An experimental barrier height value of about 0.5 eV is obtained for the Ti/4H-SiC JBS diodes at room temperature. A decrease in the experimental barrier height and an increase in the ideality factor with decreasing temperature are shown. Reverse recovery testing also shows the temperature dependence of the peak recovery current density and the reverse recovery time. Finally, a discussion of reducing the reverse recovery time is presented.